| Thought experiment. I have a machine that produces a standard normal distribution. I know this because I built it and tested it a lot (alternatively, have God/divinity/an oracle/whatever build this machine). You sample from it 100 times and get the number 3000 every time. What can you say about the machine? Did it follow a normal distribution? Really? How much was your statement about normal distributions able to predict what happened? What does it mean for something to follow a law? The word law comes from a legal background for rules in human society. If society makes a law, can that law be broken following a normal distribution? > I wouldn't bet against classical laws due to quantum interaction. In my daily life I do not. However, given that the inner workings of the human brain are not explicable in our current understanding of physics, I don't need to 'bet against classical laws' there. We already know that something is going on. > Can you name any specific physicists who should change their outlook? There are several competing outlooks in physics right now. One is the 'shut up and calculate' approach which admits there are unknowable, unobservable, unmeasurable 'systems' (for lack of a better word) and all we can do is make colloquial statistical claims about them. Another is that the universe is always predictable and quantum choice is due to the branching of the universe into many observable worlds (although they never explain why my conscious experience only follows one path... one is forced to conclude they believe some quantum process is in play). Another is that quantum physics is just completely wrong (unlikely). Another is that consciousness (which is undefined) is a crucial feature to quantum mechanics and is necessary to cause collapse of the wave function. There's pilot wave theory which requires there to be an unseeable aether (and again, admits no way to measure the aether, so I'm not sure that exists). There's a whole list of spiritual beliefs about quantum mechanics here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mec... Depending on your belief in what takes place (and it's really truly a belief, and in some systems, it's going to stay that way), take your pick of scientists who should change their outlook. > How should they be doing experiments differently due to your point? They shouldn't. Most physicists do good work explaining the way the world works, but they also admit that there are unknowable, unobservable, unmeasurable systems that govern it. The comment I replied to claimed otherwise. |